ABSTRACT
Fostering right-brain connection begins with therapists making safe non-verbal connection with clients and working with/around clients’ strategies for disconnection. Selfobject experience is the name self psychology gives to forms of right-brain connection that make special contributions to the development of a cohesive, energetic, and relationally competent self. As clients need them, therapists offer selfobject connections such as mirroring, idealizing, and twinning. Right-brain regulation of interpersonal rage requires unflinching interpersonal presence. A deep right-brain sense of deficit requires patient nurture. Nevertheless, connection may be threatening. But “safe emergencies” create mild to moderate affective arousal, and this optimal stress leads to optimal integration of dissociated neural networks, Cozolino maintains. Creating positive attachment experiences to rework old attachment strategies is another way to conceptualize fostering right-brain connection. Linking events and emotions is a simple but effective form of building right-brain connectivity.
